Was Sarin Gas Used in West Ghouta, Syria?

Was the chemical weapon agent Sarin gas used in the Damascus suburb of Moadamiyah on August 21 of this year?

Based on the United Nations' Report on the Alleged Use of Chemical Weapons in the Ghouta Area of Damascus on 21 August 2013, released to much fanfare back in mid-September, I put together this Summary table (below) to help clarify and simplify what the UN team of inspectors actually reported, given the environmental samples they collected in the Moadamiyah area of West Ghouta on August 26, and what the same UN team collected in the Zamalka and Ein Tarma areas of East Ghouta on August 28 and 29.

The UN team’s report states definitively that “The positive blood and urine specimens provide definitive evidence of exposure to Sarin by almost all of the survivors assessed by the Mission” (p. 5). And in its "Conclusions," the UN team is even more emphatic: “[T]he environmental, chemical and medical samples we have collected, provide clear and convincing evidence that surface-to-surface rockets containing the nerve agent Sarin were used in Ein Tarma, Moadamiyah and Zamalka in the Ghouta area of Damascus” (p. 5).

But when one turns to Appendix 7 of this report, where the results of the environmental samples collected by the UN team and analyzed by two independent laboratories are reported, one reads that 100 percent of the tests of the Moadamiyah samples came back negative for evidence of Sarin, and only a minority of the tests (i.e., 8 out of 30) came back positive for evidence of various kinds of degraded Sarin or possible by-products of Sarin.

If these UN-reported results indicate strongly that there is environmental evidence that an airborne version of the chemical weapon agent Sarin was used in East Ghouta on August 21, they also indicate just as strongly or even more strongly that there is no or very little environmental evidence that an airborne version of the chemical weapon agent Sarin was used in West Ghouta on that same date.

So let's let the UN team's results speak for themselves.

Of course, none of what follows has any bearing on questions concerning the agents responsible for these alleged as well as real uses of Sarin that night in suburbs outside Damascus.

[ 2 ] See Result for Laboratory 2 at Sample 19, p. 31.—I am unable to explain why the result for this particular test was not reported by Laboratory 2, although the test was carried out and its result reported by Laboratory 1.